when sending a message from the buffer is the buffer automatically cleared? - c

I'm trying to write a code for a socket where I first read the stdin and send to a socket then read from said socket to send to stdout and so far I have something that looks more or less like this (before you attack me I also don't know why I have to do this) :
void read_write(int socket_descriptor_file){
int n = 1;
char buffer_in[1024];
while(n>0){
n = fread(&buffer_in,sizeof(buffer_in),1, stdin);
if(n==0) break;
ssize_t sent_status = send(socket_description_file, buffer_in, sizeof(buffer_in), 0);
if(sent_status == -1){
printf("nothing sent");
}
ssize_t receive_status = recv(socket_descriptor_file,buffer_in,sizeof(buffer_in), 0);
if(receive_status == -1){
printf("nothing received ");
}
fwrite(&buffer_in,sizeof (char), sizeof(buffer_in), stdout);
fflush(stdout);
}
}
I'm unsure as to if the said buffer when applying the send function will automatically clear so that I can use the buffer to store the message from the recv function.
The objective of this code is to simulate a chat between a host 1 and a host 2. So it is necessary to send treat the message immediately.
I'm also apparently supposed to use the poll function but I don't really know how to use it.
I'm not really well informed in this subject so please let me know if there are any further problems with my code. I would be happy to hear them :)

The buffer is only memory. And after a successfull call to send the content is not needed any more. So it is ok to reuse the buffer for recv. Probably you want to store the reveived number of bytes (reveive_status) and not the size of the buffer to your file.

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No code runs after a read or a write in socket programming in c [closed]

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I am making a server client program in c.
The server starts first waits for the client then the client "connects".
after the client connects it waits for input from the user while the server is running read() to get that input from the client.
Here is the main issue.
after a new line character has been discovered by the while loop it then sends this data in the buffer from the client to the server which is waiting with a read. The server reads but no code below the read can be run unless it has something to do with the buffer.
so if the code is like this
read(socket_fd, buff, sizeof(buff));
printf("data from the client: %s", buff); // this line will be run in the terminal
printf("TESTING TESTING TESTING"); // this line will never be read
same thing on the clients side.
after it performs the write() on the client side any code that is under the write will not be ran. basically making this essentially a deadlock where both programs (I think) are just waiting on input from the other.
I don't know why this is. perhaps it is waiting for more data with the read, but that wouldn't explain why it runs code that prints the buffer but not anything else.
here is the snippet that sends and recieves data from the client side. The server is set up with TCP
while(1){
//wait for data from user
bzero(buffer, 256);
printf("Enter the string : ");
n = 0;
while ((buffer[n++] = getchar()) != '\n')
;
write(sockfd, buffer, sizeof(buffer));
printf("WE HERE");
read(sockfd, buffer, sizeof(buffer));
printf("READING THE DATA");
printf("From Server : %s", buffer);
if ((strncmp(buffer, "exit", 4)) == 0) {
printf("Client Exit...\n");
break;
}
}
and here is the server code which reads the data from the client and provides a response.
while(1) {
bzero(buffer, 256);
//read the message from the client
read(newsockfd, buffer, sizeof(buffer));
printf("From the client: %s", buffer);
printf("WORKING HERE BEFORE LOWER CASE [SERVER]");
printf("the buffer again: %s", buffer);
lower_string(buffer);
printf("WORKING AFTER THE LOWER CASE [SERVER]");
write(sockfd, buffer, sizeof(buffer));
printf("WRITING TO THE CLIENT");
if (strncmp("exit", buffer, 4) == 0) {
printf("Server Exit...\n");
break;
}
bzero(buffer, 256);
}
Your code contains a number of problems:
You aren't putting newline characters at the end of your printf() statements, which means that the printed text won't be visible until the stdout buffer gets full enough to force it to be flushed to the console. That is probably confusing you about the behavior of your program, since printf() statements are being executed but you aren't seeing their output in a timely manner. You should do e.g. printf("WE HERE\n"); rather than printf("WE HERE");
You aren't capturing the return values from send() and recv() into a variable so that you can examine what values they returned and act on them appropriately. If you don't look at the return values, you don't know how many bytes were actually sent or received (it may be less than the number of bytes you asked to be sent or received!) and you don't know if there was an error or an EOF condition that occurred.
You should be aware that recv() will block until at least one byte of data is available to place into your passed-in buffer, and similarly, write() can block until at least one byte of your passed-in buffer can be consumed by the networking stack. This can indeed lead to a deadlock in certain circumstances (e.g. if the remote peer never sends any data because it is blocked inside a recv() waiting for you to send some data to it first). This problem can be handled via various more advanced techniques (e.g. timeouts, or non-blocking or asynchronous I/O) but I won't go into those here.
Zeroing out your entire 256-byte array and then receiving up to 256 bytes means that in the case where you received 256 bytes of data at once, your array will not be NUL-terminated, and you will invoke undefined behavior if you try to use it as a C-string (e.g. by passing it to printf("%s", buffer);. You'd be better off receiving sizeof(buf)-1 bytes instead (and if you capture the return value of recv() as suggested in point #2, you can then just set buffer[numBytesReceived] = '\0'; afterwards, which is a more efficient way to make sure the string is NUL-terminated than unnecessarily clearing out all 256 bytes)
Note that you cannot assume that you will recv() the entire string within a single recv() call. It's unlikely to happen in this toy program (unless your network conditions are very bad), but in general it's possible for the sender to send() e.g. "123456789" and the receiver's first recv() call to get "1234" and then the second recv() call gets "567" and then the third gets "89", or any other combination of subsets of the string. The receiver is guaranteed to receive all of the bytes in order, but not guaranteed to receive them all at once. Production-level code would need to be smart enough to handle that correctly.

How to send and receive newline character over sockets in a client server model?

I am trying to learn client server model in Linux and I have setup two C files namely server.c and client.c. These are the code snippets that I seem to have problems with.
server.c code snippet
char* message = "<query>\n";
write(client_socket_filedescriptor, message, sizeof(message));
client.c code snippet
char* message = "<query>\n";
read(socket_filedescriptor, buffer, sizeof(buffer));
printf("%s", buffer);
printf("\n\n");
printf("%s", message);
Now when I run my server and then when I run my client, I expect the printf statements to print the same strings that is <query>\n, but I keep getting different outputs for buffer and message variables.
The output looks a bit like this when I run client code.
Output image
As you see, these two strings are different. I am trying to simulate a typical TCP handshake and I want to make sure that these two strings are same and then client will start writing or doing something with that server. But I am having this trivial problem. Could anyone tell my how to resolve it? I plan to use strcmp to compare buffer and message variables, but as it stands now, strcmp doesn't return 0 since these are different strings afterall.
You are ignoring the count returned by read(). It can be -1, indicating an error, or zero, indicating end of stream, or a positive number, indicating how many bytes were received. You cannot assume that read() fills the buffer, or that a single send() or write() corresponds to a single recv() or read().
In detail:
write(client_socket_filedescriptor, message, sizeof(message));
You are only sending four bytes, the size of the pointer. And you're ignoring the return value. It should be
int count = write(client_socket_filedescriptor, message, strlen(message));
if (count == -1)
perror("write"); // or better
char* message = "<query>\n";
read(socket_filedescriptor, buffer, sizeof(buffer));
That should be
int count = read(socket_filedescriptor, buffer, sizeof(buffer));
if (count == -1)
perror("read"); // or better
else if (count == 0)
; // end of stream: the peer has disconnected: close the socket and stop reading
else
Back to your code:
printf("%s", buffer);
That should be
printf("%.*s", count, buffer);
I plan to use strcmp()
You should plan to use strncmp(), with count above as the length parameter. In any case you can't assume the input ends with a null unless you (a) ensure you send the null, which you aren't, and (b) write a read loop that stops when you've read it.

Redirecting stdout to socket in client-server situation

I'm new to this forum, so I'm sorry if my question is not correctly asked. I'll try to be as clear as possible.
I'm trying to code two programs (client.c and server.c, using TCP sockets) in Linux, with the following behavior:
Client sends messages to Server that contain commands (ls, mkdir, etc) to be run by Server.
Server runs these commands, and sends program output (stdout) back to Client.
Client prints the recieved program output.
So far, I have this:
server.c:
/*After creating socket with socket(), binding to address and port,
putting in listening mode and accepting connection*/
dup2(sock_client,1); //redirect stdout
while(1){
recv(sock_client,buf,MAX_MSG_LENGTH,0);
/*If the message recieved was END_STRING, exit this loop*/
if (strncmp(buf, END_STRING, MAX_MSG_LENGTH) == 0)
break;
system(buf);
}
client.c:
/*After creating socket and connecting*/
while(fgets(buf,MAX_MSG_LENGTH,stdin)){
send(sock,buf,MAX_MSG_LENGTH,0);
if (!strncmp(buf,END_STRING,MAX_MSG_LENGTH)){
/*If the message recieved was END_STRING, exit this loop*/
break;
}
read(sock,buf,MAX_MSG_LENGTH); //read stdout from program
printf("%s\n",buf);
}
My problem is that, if a command has a long output, there's some "garbage" left from it when showing the output of the next commands, so I was wondering if there was a way to flush the socket (apparently not, based on my google research), or maybe to accomplish the expected server-client behavior in some other way.
Thank you!
EDIT:
Ok, I've finished the client. Here's the code:
client.c:
/* After creating socket and connecting*/
while(fgets(buf,MAX_MSG_LENGTH,stdin)){
send(sock,buf,MAX_MSG_LENGTH,0);
if (!strncmp(buf,END_STRING,MAX_MSG_LENGTH)){
/*If the message recieved was END_STRING, exit this loop*/
break;
}
while(1){
read_size = read(sock,buf,MAX_MSG_LENGTH);
/*Print read_size characters from buf*/
printf("%.*s\n", read_size, buf);
if (read_size < MAX_MSG_LENGTH){
/*Keep on reading until read_size < MAX_MSG_LENGTH, then exit this loop*/
break;
}
}
/*Clear buffer, just in case*/
for (i = 0; i < MAX_MSG_LENGTH; i++){
buf[i] = 0;
}
Just as a comment, this program will not work properly if the command sent to the server doesn't have any standard output (for example, mkdir new_directory), since, in this case, read() will leave the client permanently blocked, causing the server to never recieve the next command to be run or the END_STRING message to leave the program from the client. You could probably fix this by using a non-blocking socket and using select() to read from socket, just like synther suggested. Additionally, in the server, after the system(buf); line, you should add fflush(0), which will flush all the buffers (including the socket, which could be useful if the command send by the client has a really short output).
Thanks a lot!
Thank you for your answers!
I tried adding this to my client.c code:
/*After creating socket and connecting*/
while(fgets(buf,MAX_MSG_LENGTH,stdin)){
/*Send command to server*/
send(sock,buf,MAX_MSG_LENGTH,0);
if (!strncmp(buf,END_STRING,MAX_MSG_LENGTH)){
/*If the message recieved was END_STRING, exit this loop*/
break;
}
while(1){
read_size = read(sock,buf,MAX_MSG_LENGTH); //read stdout from program
printf("%.*s\n", read_size, buf);
if (read_size < MAX_MSG_LENGTH){
/*Exit this loop when reading less that MAX_MSG_LENGTH*/
break;
}
}
/*Clear the 'buf' array. I don't know if this is really necessary*/
for (i = 0; i < MAX_MSG_LENGTH; i++){
buf[i] = 0;
}
}
And now, after every command, the client only prints the output of the last command sent. I will test it more thoroughly and edit my original post if this solution is correct, so thanks a lot!
Perhaps, you get "garbage" in client when your command's output exceeds MAX_MSG_LENGTH. read(sock,buf,MAX_MSG_LENGTH); reads just MAX_MSG_LENGTH bytes from socket, remaining chars in socket are read the next time when you except it from the next command.
You can fix it in multiple ways in client.
read returns the actual number of bytes read. You can compare it with MAX_MSG_LENGTH and decide to read one more time or not. But if your actual data is exactly MAX_MSG_LENGTH bytes then you decide to read again and read blocks waiting data that is not available at the moment (and stdin blocks too, user can't send new command).
Use non-blocking socket to fix issue in 1. read will return immediately when no available data.
Add end-of-command marker to your server's output and client will know when to stop reading and switch to stdin reading.
Use select() mechanism to read from socket and user input "simultaneously". It allows to read from multiple file descriptors (socket and stdio) when data available on any of them.
Additionally, you use the same buffer for user commands and server responses. Typically, user commands are shorter then server output and buf could contain parts of last server outputs. Then you send this mix of user command and last server output to server.
And, as stated above, read returns the actual number of bytes read. You should print the exactly received number of bytes from buf, not all the data.
int ret = read(sock,buf,MAX_MSG_LENGTH); //read stdout from program
printf("%.*s\n", ret, buf);

C parsing HTTP Chunked transfer encoding response

I am developing a client that needs to parse Chunked-type HTTP transfers. I've beat my head against the wall trying to figure out the error with the following, and would appreciate it if someone might be able to catch my error a bit quicker. To sum up the issue: it seems as though, the client does not receive ALL of the chunk, thereby screwing up the rest of the process. Thanks in advance!
while(cflag){
pfile_chunk = malloc(CHUNK_SIZE+1);
memset(pfile_chunk, 0, CHUNK_SIZE);
cPtr = pfile_chunk;
cPtr2 = NULL;
k=0;
while(*(cPtr-1) != '\n'){
k++;
recv(sock, cPtr, 1, 0);
cPtr = pfile_chunk+k;
}
cPtr2 = strchr(pfile_chunk, '\r');
*cPtr2 = '\0';
sscanf(pfile_chunk, "%x", &l);
if(l == 0)
break;
printf("\nServer wants to deliver %ld bytes.\n", l);
pfile_chunk = realloc(pfile_chunk, l+1);
memset(pfile_chunk, 0, l);
recv(sock, pfile_chunk, l, 0);
fputs(pfile_chunk, f);
printf("GOT THIS, SIZE %ld:\n%s\n", strlen(pfile_chunk), pfile_chunk);
//get next \r\n bytes.
recv(sock, NULL, 2, 0);
}
At the very least, you should check the return value of recv to see if you are getting the number of bytes you are expecting to get.
A short read is definitely possible on the network, since the system call will return whatever is available in the socket receive buffer at the time you make the call.
Implement a loop until you have read in your entire chunk, or pass the MSG_WAITALL flag to recv in the last parameter. However, you still need to check for an error from recv.
ssize_t r = recv(sock, pfile_chunk, l, MSG_WAITALL);
if (r < l) {
/* check for errors ... */
} else {
/* got the data */
}
It looks as though your very first dereference for the check in your while loop will access before the beginning of your array, which is likely not to be desired behavior. Hopefully, that memory location usually won't contain \n. That could mess up your read. I expect it probably contains some information to do with your malloc, which is unlikely to be \n, so you might never see a problem from that.
Also, hopefully you can trust the other end of the socket not to send more than CHUNK_SIZE+1 before they give you a \n. Otherwise, it could seg-fault out. Normally, though, I would expect a sender to just send 10 or fewer ASCII numeric characters and a CRLF for a chunk header anyways, but they could theoretically send a bunch of long chunk extension header fields with it.
Apart from that, there's just the more important issue already found by user315052 that you should either tell the recv method to wait for all the data you requested, or check how much data it actually read.

how read all the server's responses from a socket?

I have a very big problem... I'm working with sockets in C. I send a request to the server which sends me many responses. The problem is that the client receives the first response and then the connection is closed. What can I do? I tried with setsockopt()... SO_KEEPALIVE or SO_LINGER but I haven't resolved the problem. Can you help me? Thanks a lot
To be more clear here is the code. The socket is automatically closed after a certain amount of time or after the client received the first response... I'm not sure.
char* demarre_client( client_args * c_args,char* message, /*char* SERVEUR_PORT*/int port){
int socket_client=socket(PF_INET,SOCK_STREAM,0);
memset(&(c_args->adresse_serveur),0,sizeof(c_args->adresse_serveur));
c_args->adresse_serveur.sin_family=AF_INET;
c_args->adresse_serveur.sin_addr.s_addr=inet_addr(SERVEUR_IP);
//int port=APHash(SERVEUR_PORT,strlen(SERVEUR_PORT));
c_args->adresse_serveur.sin_port=htons(port);
int err=0;
if ((err=connect(socket_client, (struct sockaddr *) &(c_args->adresse_serveur), sizeof(c_args->adresse_serveur)))<0)
{
printf("CONNECT error %d\n", errno);
exit(-1);
}
if (send(socket_client, message, strlen(message), 0)!=strlen(message))
{
printf("send error!!\n");
exit(-2);
}
char* raspFin=(char* )malloc(sizeof(char)*1024);
strcpy(raspFin,"");
int num=-1;
int nn=0;
char* rasp=(char* )malloc(sizeof(char)*1024);
memset (rasp, 0, 1024 * sizeof(char ));
/* here it reads the first response and after he get out of while */
while ((num=recv(socket_client, rasp,1024,MSG_WAITALL))>0)
{
printf("recu %s mun=%d\n" , rasp,num);
strcat(raspFin,rasp);
strcat(raspFin,"\n");
rasp=(char* )malloc(sizeof(char)*1024);
memset (rasp, 0, 1024 * sizeof(char ));
}
if (num<0)
{
printf("rasp error!!\n");
exit(-3);
}
Are you sure you don't get all responses on first call?
TCP/IP is stream protocol without flow control built-in so different messages, sent using separate send() calls, can be received in one recv(). Because you use printf(), it prints the buffer until it sees null-terminator - maybe other responses beyond the terminator?
Try to use some flow control, like sending message length prefix or using some special characters (like STX/ETX, but make sure your message doesn't contain such characters). You'd need to implement some flow-control anyway if you plan to use this software.
For now try replacing your printf() with
char *ptr;
for (ptr = buffer; ptr <= buffer + num; ptr += strlen(ptr)+1;)
printf("%s\n", ptr);
It will print all strings from your response buffer.
And you don't need malloc() inside the loop - you leak memory.
BTW SO_KEEPALIVE and SO_LINGER have nothing to do with this problem.
My suggestion would be to fire up Wireshark network analyzer and see what's happening packet-wise. In filters set
tcp.srcport == <insert_server_port> || tcp.dstport == <insert_server_port>
You should see what data actually gets sent to and who closes the connection (sends FIN/RST packets).

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